Published in City Brief
Hatice Utkan
Including painting, video and installation, Hulusi’s diverse practice centers on the mining of what could be termed as the collective unconscious.
Hulusi’s epic show denotes a series of large hyperrealistic paintings of lush Cypriot almond blossoms, taken from his photographs. The flower canvases were painted by copyists and each placed next to a bold black-and-white Op Art painting of expanding rays.
Quoting and re-presenting aspects of the known and familiar via different conventions, stereotypes and genres – popular culture, advertising, kitsch, photorealism – he examines our fascination with images and their potential as “devices to take you out of this world.”
His overtly mediated depictions of the real confront the viewer with coded parameters.
Paradoxically, in their exaggeration, they also remind us to look at the possibility of empathy and to allow subjective readings and resonances to come into play.
The Ecstasy Almond Blossom (Quad) perfectly epitomizes these productive contradictions inherent in Hulusi’s work. Competing for our attention, these two highly manipulated tropes of appropriated “beauty” hold us in their thrall despite their ersatz status, acting, in Hulusi’s words, as “secular icons of escapism.”
Copied, cloned, zoomed and stretched like all his imagery for maximum aesthetic effect, Hulusi’s recurring use of abstraction is appropriated from a variety of sources, including Op art, advertising, computer graphics and Islamic design.
In the Abstract Rose series, the flower paintings are again coupled with various abstract designs. Using more fluid shapes compared to the starburst designs, these abstractions lend the diptychs a different mood compared to the quads, but are no less knowing in their tactics.
Illusory Nature (Roses) presents another invitation “to lose yourself” in a beguiling visuality. An assortment of monitors loop close-ups of roses against Hulusi’s characteristically optimistic blue skies, the overall plush effect accentuated by the fading of the images in and out of focus. Filmed in real time, with the roses swaying gently in the breeze, the images allude to and indulge in conventions of bliss and beauty.